The importance of self-respect

We dare not forget the high calling with which God charged us to bring blessing and redemption to the entire world.

Parshat Shlah.
(photo credit:Israel Weiss)

The most difficult incident in the desert was the refusal of the Israelites to
conquer the Land of Israel. Had they left Egypt and made their way directly to
the Promised Land, the redemption would have happened immediately. Hence, while
the sin of the Golden Calf was forgiven by God as a result of Moses’ entreaties,
the reverberations of the sin of the scouts continues throughout the
generations. The day they refused to conquer Israel was the ninth day of Av, a
true doomsday of Jewish history, on which we commemorate the destruction of both
Temples, the expulsion of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition and the Nuremberg
decrees that signaled the beginning of the Holocaust.

What is the
connection between the sin of the scouts and the commandment of the ritual
fringes that concludes the portion of Shlah? What comment does it make on the
backsliding of the People of Israel vis-a-vis the Land of Israel? The Sfat Emet
(Yehuda Aryeh Leib Alter, 1847–1905) explains the sins of the scouts in profound
psychological terms. He asks how renowned men, princes of their tribes who had
just experienced the miracles of the Exodus from Egypt, could lose their faith
in God to such an extent that they refused to attempt the conquest of Israel.
His response is that their sin was not a lack of faith in God; their sin was a
lack of faith in themselves.

The scouts made a reconnaissance tour of the
land and were struck by the strength of the peoples who lived there and the
fortifications they had built. “There we saw the giants who were the children of
giants; we were in our own eyes as grasshoppers, and so were we in their
eyes.”

The scouts seem to have been dumbstruck by the power of the
indigenous peoples and by their own impotence. With that sentence of self
deprecation – and with its inherent message that if we see ourselves as being
small and powerless that will be exactly how the enemy will see us – the 13th
chapter of the Book of Numbers concludes. Chapter 14 begins, “And the entire
congregation lifted up their voices, gave forth a cry and the nation wept on
that night.” This was the night of the ninth of Av, teaches the Midrash. Their
sin was that they didn’t believe in themselves.

I can readily understand
why this was the case. After all, the Israelites had just concluded a period of
210 years of enslavement in Egypt. James Baldwin, the well-known champion of
rights for blacks in South Africa and America, put it very well when he said: “I
can forgive the whites for subjugating the blacks. I can never forgive the
whites for making the blacks believe that they were worthy of being
subjugated.”

This is the well-known syndrome of the battered wife who
remains with her husband because she has come to believe that she deserves to be
beaten. The Israelites had been persecuted for so long and dehumanized to such
an extent that they had lost the image of God within themselves, that they no
longer felt the empowerment of free human beings.

This is the most
profound message of the ritual fringes and specifically of the t’chelet. The
ritual fringes, the white threads entwined with the royal blue thread, are
reminiscent of the blue-white of the sea, of the blue-white of the heavens and
of the presence of God, whose dwelling place is in the heavens above. The first
message of the ritual fringes, therefore, is to remind us – whenever we look at
our garment (and in talmudic times they wore four-cornered outer garments which
were always punctuated with the ritual fringes) – of God and His commandments,
which must follow us wherever we go just as our outer garment follows us
wherever we go.

But there is a second idea. The High Priest in the
Sanctuary wore a tzitz (turban) made of t’chelet with words upon it reading
“Holy unto the Lord.” T’chelet was the highest symbol of the high priest and
t’chelet was the color that emanated from the expensive dye taken from the rare
hilazon fish; it was worn by royalty and by the aristocracy.

Every
Israelite male was commanded to wear t’chelet because he was indeed a miniature
high priest (the word “tzitzit” is derived from “tzitz”), imbued and emboldened
with the command to be a member of a sacred nation and a kingdom of
priests/teachers to all of humanity. We dare not forget the high calling with
which God charged us to bring blessing and redemption to the entire world. We
dare not lose faith in ourselves, because if we do the world will not be
redeemed.

This is the final message of the portion of Shlah, bidding us
to understand that only through our kingship and sovereignty over Israel will we
be able to see to it that “Torah will come forth from Zion and the word of God
from Jerusalem to the entire world.”

PICTURE FROM THE PARASHA

‘And they rose up early in the morning, and got them up to the top of the
mountain, saying: “Lo, we are here, and will go up unto the place which the Lord
hath promised; for we have sinned”’ (Shlah; Numbers 14:40)

The writer is the founder and
chancellor of Ohr Torah Stone Colleges and Graduate Programs, and chief rabbi of
Efrat.